Since the beginning, the earth has been changing, evolving slowly over the eons.  Continental plates drifting.  Environmental changes causing ice ages to come and go.  Meteor impacts that almost wiped out all life.

Sometimes though, these events and cause other things to happen.  Unexpected and unbelievable things.  On May 18, 1980, just such an event happened.  At 8:32AM on that day life as we knew it changed irrevocably.  

With a fury that had never been witnessed by human eyes Mount St. Helens erupted, but as spectacular and deadly as that explosion was, it was just ground zero of a global catastrophe.  With as advanced as human science is, there are still many secrets of the universe that have not been discovered.  The existence of magic was one of those secrets.

Until Mount St. Helens erupted, Ley Lines and magic were thought to be figments of imagination.  Magic was real, just dormant, and when the volcano erupted it was centered on a major Ley Line.  It was like the floodgates of a dam had been thrown wide open and the chain reaction it caused rocked the world.  Seven major volcanos in the world erupted one after another as the released magic rushed along the network of Ley Lines across the globe.  The super volcano under Yellowstone, Sakurajima in Japan, Grimsvotn in Iceland, Mt. Vesuvius in Itay, Galeras in Colombia, Mauna Loa in Hawaii and Colima in Mexico all erupted within seconds of each other.

Approximately 85 million people across the world died that day.  Hundreds of thousands more people that were in the path of the revitalized Ley Lines went missing.  At first it was assumed the energy had vaporized them but later the missing people started returning through portals that formed at the nexus of larger Ley Lines.

With the amount of volcanic ash that was released into the atmosphere the average mean temperature of the globe initially dropped by 4 degrees, sparking food shortages and famine for the first few years after the event.  Today the temperature has partially returned to normal, being a predicted 1 degree below normal.  The ice at the poles has not been melting during the summers and scientist are predicting that the earth is experiencing a mini-ice age.

Two large landmasses materialized that day.  In the Bermuda Triangle, an island the size of Texas appeared populated by what can only be described as demons.  The island was named after the maybe not so mythical Atlantis.  The second landmass appeared in the Pacific Ocean just over 600 miles east of Japan.  It was almost twice the size of Japan and was populated with beings known only in fantasy beforehand.  Elves, dwarves and many other races lived there.  It was Named Mythos Island and after a few years, over the objections of the Japanese government was made its own country.

Now in 2017, 37 years after the events of that fateful morning, life goes on.  Magic users now exist across the globe and two universities offer degrees on the different schools of magic that exist.  Those universities being Berkley in California and The University of Tokyo in Japan.